Nurgle Lord Conversion - Golden Demon UK 2012 Entry

Well, my best laid plans at the beginning of the year to bring a number of entries to GDUK in 2012 went out of the window by the time September rolled around and I was left with only one model to take - one that wasn't created with the intention of entering to boot!

The figure I ended up taking was a converted plastic Nurgle Lord. If I had known when I started just how saturated the fantasy single category of Golden Demons around the world have become with entries based on this figure I would probably have picked another!

Still, the base figure is an instant classic sculpt and the conversion and paint job were both enjoyable and came very naturally.

You can see the figure in its unpainted state in a previous blog post here.

I took a lot of inspiration from the brilliant job Darren Latham (of GW Eavy Metal team fame) did on his Nurgle Lord for the paint job.

The style is a bit brighter and more sharply highlighted than my previous work - a bit of a change in painting direction to try and work more contrast in to my highlighting. While the paint job is far from perfect, I am happy enough with how it has come out.

The base was also enjoyable to make - I tried to make it blend with the plinth, overlapping the round bevelled edge of the 40mm GW base in areas to try and draw the eye into the scene a bit more. I'm in two minds as to whether the base is too big for the figure and whether he would have been more successful on a smaller base.

In the end I managed to come away with a finalist pin from what I felt was an incredibly strongly contested category. While I'm a little bummed it is my first time entering GD and not coming away with a trophy, I am still pleased enough with his performance given he hadn't been painted with the intention of entering him into the Golden Demon contest.

For those who would like to vote on CMON, he can be found here - all votes and comments are much appreciated! :)

Feel free to let me know what you think in the comments below. Do you like the new style? Is it something I should continue with? Thoughts welcome.

Nurgle Lord Conversion

I have had the fantastic Brian Nelson plastic Nurgle Lord model from Games Workshop sitting on my painting desk for a few months now, partially assembled and waiting for some attention. The problem was, I knew I wanted to convert him - I can't seem to not convert a model these days - but I didn't know what I wanted to do to him and was hesitant to start cutting him up only to regret it.

Anyway, I had some extra time off from work over the Easter weekend last week and I decided to just sit down and work on some models since I had been in a bit of a lull of late. Shrugging off my earlier hesitations, I decided to start working on the Nurgle Lord figure, despite the absence of a clear idea in my head for how the finished piece should look.

While this is quite unusual for me, the process was quite liberating as I wasn't frustrating myself by trying to work too precisely towards an image in my head.

The end result of a few hours work is what you can see below. I clipped off the horns on the shoulder pad and turned them into disease ridden pustules. I added the crow from the Empire General kit, with a little conversion and tidying up, to return some height and attention to the area and also to create some visual lines through what is otherwise quite a 2D pose.

The head received the most sculpting work to create a hideous face, half covered by a helmet with horn bursting through. The rest of the work composed of adding some rivet detail to flat armour plates (rivets always catch rust well so they would help work some contrast in when it came time to paint) and to tidy up areas of soft detail due to the limitations of plastic casting.

All in all, I am pretty pleased with how he has turned out. While not radically different from the original sculpt (I don't think he needed to be anyway - the original is was an instant classic) he is different enough to be unique, which is what I was going for.

I used a mix of ProCreate and Milliput putties (about 50:50) for the face/helmet sculpting, ProCreate on its own for the horn and Milliput for the armour plate fixes.






All in, not bad for a few hours work I think. I will be painting him up in the coming weeks. I picked up a few of the new GW paints to test them out so will try to provide my thoughts on these two in the next few posts as I work on the model.

As usual, feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comments below.